San Bernardino, a southern California city of more than 200,000, recently declared bankruptcy. Municipal bankruptcies are rare, but not unprecedented.

Vallejo, Calif., in the San Francisco Bay area, for instance, filed for bankruptcy protection in May 2008. Jefferson County, Ala., sought bankruptcy protection in November 2011. And Stockton, Calif., population 300,000, filed for bankruptcy on June 26, after essentially spending itself out of business. Other cities, including Harrisburg, Pa., also stand at the brink.

You probably don’t give a great deal of thought to Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate. Maybe you should. Mitt Romney certainly is.

Romney’s political cronies in Michigan have gotten Johnson kicked off the November ballot there because he was three minutes late in filing some paperwork. With polls indicating the race for Michigan’s 16 votes is a dead heat, Romney’s camp doesn’t want to take any chances that Johnson, a former Republican who served two terms as governor of New Mexico, will siphon off any of his votes.

The state appears to be making good headway on the enormous job of reviewing every possible aspect of the proposed Susitna hydroelectric dam.

It’s about time, because all that scrutiny will require time. There is no sense in waiting to get started. The sooner we do, the sooner we can get the project built if it holds up under all the microscopes.

There is one necessary condition for the selection of a vice president, and that is whether the individual has the experience and capacity to become president of the United States on Day One. Nine vice presidents have succeeded to the presidency upon vacancy of that office — one in five presidents. Five of those nine vice presidents became president after fewer than 200 days as vice president, and on average they served less than one year (357 days) before moving higher.

Last Sunday I was driving home on Mendenhall Loop Road after visiting some parishioners. In the course of my journey, I needed to pull over a couple of times due to the number of emergency vehicles responding to a call. It was the next day that I learned, with the rest of the Juneau community, of the tragic drowning death at Mendenhall Lake of a visitor from Texas who was kayaking with family members. I was grateful to find out that our deacon from the Cathedral was among those ministering to the family and the caregivers that night.

Hats off to Apple. Seldom does a company of its size and prominence have the courage to so quickly admit it made a mistake.

The trendsetter’s decision Friday to rejoin the prominent green technology registry it had just left re-establishes Apple’s commitment to sustainability. It also maintains the company’s leadership role in influencing competitors to be environmentally aware.

It long has been our theory that the Monica Lewinsky scandal resulted in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton because everyone could understand it. It was patently sleazy. No subtlety was involved.

Compare that to the finagling that led to the 2008 collapse of the financial markets. Trillions of dollars, millions of jobs and hundreds of thousands of homes were lost. And the average American still has no clue about “credit default swaps.”

WASHINGTON — To paraphrase the old saying about horses and water, you can give a corporation money, but you can’t make it spend.

Thanks to record profits, essentially zero short-term borrowing costs and extremely low effective tax rates, U.S. companies are sitting on over a trillion dollars in cash. Further business tax breaks — while deepening our nation’s fiscal crisis — will do nothing to provide the real incentive companies need in order to invest in our economy: strong consumer demand.